Lydia Davis - Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

He has also sent me more items from the “Crime Beat” section.

“At 10:30 pm a Putnam Avenue resident said an unknown person broke into the home by pushing in the rear door. A dollar bill was taken.”

“At 9:12 am a North Cambridge man from Mass. Ave. said someone had broken in but nothing was missing.”

“A Belmont resident working at a Mass. Ave. address stated that another employee told her that she had been fired and then proceeded to scratch the victim in the neck.” By this one he wrote in the margin: “Why? What is the connection?”

“Friday, March 11. At 11:30 pm, a Concord Avenue woman was walking down Garden Street near Mass. Ave. when a man asked her ‘Are you smiling?’ The woman said yes, so the man punched her in the mouth, causing her lip to bleed and swell. No arrests were made.”

“Three men were arrested for assault and battery on Third Street near Gore Street at 2:50 am. Two men are Cambridge residents, both charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, a shod foot. A Billerica man received the same charge, but with a hammer.” My father put an X in the margin beside the grammar mistake.

“Tuesday, June 13. A Rhode Island resident reported that between 8:45 am and 10 am, at an address on Garden St., an unknown person took her purse with $180 and credit cards. A male was witnessed under the table but the victim believed that it was someone from the power company.”

On my last visit, my father seemed in worse condition than I had seen him before. When I asked him if he was working on anything in particular now, he said, “No,” and then turned his head slowly to my mother and looked at her in bewilderment, his mouth hanging open. There was an expression of pain or agony on his face that seemed habitual. She looked back at him, waited a moment, impassive, and then said: “Yes, you are. You’re writing about the Bible and anti-Semitism.” He continued to stare at her.

Later that evening, before he went to bed, he said: “This is symptomatic of my condition: You’re my daughter, and I’m proud of you, but I have nothing to say to you.”

He left to get ready for bed, and then came back into the room wearing dazzling white pajamas. My mother asked me to admire his pajamas, and he stood quietly while I did. Then he said: “I don’t know what I will be like in the morning.”

After he went to bed, my mother showed me a picture of him forty years before sitting at a seminar table surrounded by students. “Just look at him there!” she said in distress, as though it were some sort of punishment that he had become what he was now — an old man with a beaked profile like a nutcracker.

Saying goodbye, I held his hand longer than usual. He may not have liked it. It is impossible to tell what he is feeling, often, but physical contact has always been difficult for him, and he has always been awkward about it. Whether out of embarrassment or absent-mindedness, he kept shaking his hand and mine up and down slightly, as though palsied.

Recently, my mother said he was still worse. He had fallen again, and he was having trouble with his bladder. Can he still work? I asked her. To me, it seemed that if he could still work, then he was all right, no matter what else was going wrong with him. Not really, she said. “He has been writing letters, but there are odd things in some of them. It may not matter, since they’re mostly to old friends.” She said maybe she should be checking them, though, before he sent them.

It was a phone conversation with another old woman that reminded me of a name I had forgotten for this time of life. After telling me about her angioplasty and her diabetes, she said. “Well, this is what you can expect when you enter the twilight years.” But it is hard not to think that my father’s bewilderment is only temporary, and that behind it, his sharp critical mind is still alive and well. With this younger, firmer mind he will continue to read the letters I send him and write back — our correspondence is only temporarily interrupted.

The latest letter I have seen from him was not written to me but to one of his grandsons. My mother thought I should see it before she sent it. The envelope was taped shut with strong packing tape. The entire letter concerns a mathematical rhyme he copied from the newspaper. It begins:

“A dozen, a gross and a score

plus three times the square root of four

divide it by seven plus five times eleven

equals nine to the square and not more.”

Then he explains mathematical terms and the solution of this problem. Because he changed the margins of his page to type the poem, and did not reset them, the whole letter is written in short lines like a poem:

“The total to be divided by 7 consists

of the following:

12 plus 144 plus 20 plus 3 times

the square root of 4.

These are the numerals above the line

over the divisor 7. They add up to 182,

which divided by seven equals 26.

26 plus 11 times 5 (55) is 81.

81 is 9 squared. A number squared is a number multiplied by itself.

The square of 9 is nine times nine or 81.”

He goes on to explain the concept of squaring numbers, and of the cube, along the way giving the etymologies of certain words, including dozen, score , and scoreboard . He talks about the sign for square root being related to the form of a tree.

I tell my mother the letter seems a little strange to me. She protests, saying that it is quite correct. I don’t argue, but say he can certainly send it. The end of the letter is less strange, except for the line breaks:

“For me memory and balance fail rapidly.

You are young and have a university library

system for your use. I, who have

a good home reference collection,

sometimes can get other people to

look up things for me, but it is not the same.

I have to explain that I have increasingly

lost my memory and sense of balance,

I can’t go any where, not the libraries

or the book stores to browse. We have to pay

a young woman to walk out with me

and prevent me from falling

though I take a mechanical walker with me.

I don’t mean it has an engine that propels it.

I do the propelling, but that it is

shiny and metal and has wheels.”

I like working near the baby, here at my desk by lamplight. The baby sleeps.

As though I were young and poor again, I was going to say.

But I am still young and poor.

Her children found it impossible to understand old Mrs. Iln now. They were forced to call her senile. But if they had paused a moment from their wild activities and tried to imagine her state of mind, they would have known that this was not the case.

Decades before, when her recent marriage had cast a pleasant light over her otherwise homely features, she had been as articulate as any other woman, perhaps even more articulate than was necessary. If her husband asked her where his cufflinks were, she might answer, “I think they are in the top drawer of your bureau, though it could be that you took them off in the dining room and they are still there, on the table, or perhaps they have fallen onto the floor by now, in all this confusion; if they got stepped on I don’t know what I would do, I just don’t know…” When she had had a little wine and felt moved to give her opinion of the political situation, she would burst out with “You know what I think? I think it’s a case of collective madness: I think they’re all insane, we’re all insane, but it isn’t our fault, and it isn’t the fault of our parents, and it isn’t the fault of our parents’ parents. I don’t know whose fault it is, but I would like to know…”